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Tisha is awesome. Of course all of us people with arms want to know how people without arms do everyday things. Does that make us petty? Maybe, but Tisha doesn’t care. She happily indulges our curiosities and answers all the questions we would otherwise be too shy to ask.

The [anterior cingulate cortex] is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions—neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit—so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong, even if it’s right.

Mac McClelland recently did some investigative warehouse job reporting in the mid west for Mother Jones. I worked at a place like this for ten years. My wife and I got to know each other while applying price labels to CD orders for Hastings, Borders Books and Music, and Amazon when they first started selling music back in the 90s. This was before the Internet really killed the brick and mortar stores, but we still had an 80% turnover rate, worked 10 to 12 hour days 6 to 7 days a week, and were under similar pressure to make our numbers. I still have nightmares about bending over 10,000 times a day.

I made it out to the IT department by the time they implemented all the totes, scanners, conveyers and really ramped up production, though. Picking and shipping large 1,000 to 10,000 item orders requires much less logistics than millions of 1 to 3 item orders.

This article hits a little too close to home for me. I think it may have soiled my day.

And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.

But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.

Gallup classifies 40% of Americans nationwide as very religious -- based on their statement that religion is an important part of their daily life and that they attend religious services every week or almost every week. Another 32% of Americans are nonreligious, based on their statement that religion is not an important part of their daily life and that they seldom or never attend religious services. The remaining 28% of Americans are moderately religious, because they say religion is important but that they do not attend services regularly or because they say religion is not important but still attend services.

How have we come to the point where reason needs a rally to defend it? To base your life on reason means to base it on evidence and logic. Evidence is the only way we know to discover what’s true about the real world. Logic is how we deduce the consequences that follow from evidence. Who could be against either? Alas, plenty of people, which is why we need the Reason Rally.

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. Symptoms of XX, which affects slightly more than half of the American population, include breasts, ovaries, a uterus, a menstrual cycle, and the potential to bear and nurse children. Now, many would argue even today that the lack of a Y chromosome should not affect my ability to make informed choices about what health care options and lunchtime cat videos are right for me. But others have posited, with increasing volume and intensity, that XX is a disability, even a roadblock on the evolutionary highway.

Brilliant. Infuriating. Inspiring.

UPDATE: Yes, my title is intended to be taken sarcastically like the article to which it links. I apologize if that wasn’t clear.

The fatalist in me accepts the inevitable Zero-G result of landing jelly side “down,” so I decided to make sure the probability would always be 100%. Realizing that the bread is merely a vehicle for conveying peanut butter and honey, I decided to spread it on both sides. In weightlessness, it’s easy to balance your slice on its edge so that it can be parked on the galley table without any fuss.